


With a Whimper

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Abandonment, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Purgatory, Shapeshifter, hardship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:30:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Castiel survive in Purgatory with the help of a shifter-child, but the climate is changing, and life keeps getting harder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With a Whimper

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt by rainylemons on the summer-themed, dean-focused H/C comment meme at hoodietime

It was misty autumn, going on winter, when Dean and Castiel arrived in Purgatory. For a time it seemed that was the only season that Purgatory knew. It was hard to speak of “days” where there was no sun or moon or stars, but sometimes the eternal twilight grew brighter, and sometimes dimmer. Often it rained in fat, sluggish, icy drops that dripped perpetually from the trees long after the storm was over.  
  
The ground was boggy and black. It squirmed with pale, blind-eyed creatures too slimy to be snakes and too big to be worms. On occasion, one would latch onto an ankle with its circular, saw-toothed mouth and start sucking blood. They’d have to chop its head off with the one knife they had between them, and then carefully pry the teeth out so as not to take a whole chunk of flesh along. Dean’s denim and boots provided a little protection. In his thin cotton pants, Castiel got the worst of it. At least he still healed quickly. They learned to keep to higher ground when they could.  
  
Castiel’s mojo was weak, almost nonexistent, but he seemed more himself than he had since he’d cracked this place open. It was hard to say if something mystical about the transition between worlds had jarred the pieces of his psyche back into place, or if it was just that the constant fight-or-flight danger of Purgatory triggered the instincts of an old soldier and forced him to lock his madness away along with many of the human traits he’d learned from the Winchesters. This was the Castiel that had raised Dean from Perdition:  cold, efficient, and as inhuman as everything else that crawled through these woods. He’d never talked much, but he scarcely spoke at all now, except to warn of danger or to plan a hunt.  
  
Castiel didn’t need food or sleep, but Dean did. He was a live man in a dead world. There were spiders the size of rats, and rats the size of dogs, and both were good to eat. Dean knew archery and fantasized about making a bow and arrows, but his carving skills didn’t live up to his imagination and the project was a failure. Catching a rat meant sneaking up, throwing himself on top of it, and stabbing it to death with his bowie knife. He inevitably got bitten a dozen times before the damn thing died, but at least it provided him with a couple of days’ worth of meat.  
  
At night, such as it was, the temperature dropped, and Dean’s bones ached in the damp. At first, he resisted Castiel’s invitation to share his body heat, but eventually he was too tired and miserable to care about guarding his masculinity. Castiel’s chest was far more comfortable to lay his head on than the ground. His trench coat was waterproof, too, and it smelled like home. Castiel would lie awake, bowie knife in hand, and watch for any sign of the packs of bear-like, red-eyed wolves that stalked the woods. Sometimes Dean awoke to feel Castiel carding his fingers through his hair, and he would pretend that he was still asleep. It was the only time that Castiel showed any warmth.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
At first, when the sky grew brighter and the days went from dim gray to hazy white Dean thought it was a stroke of luck. The air grew warmer, and the muddy ground began to dry up, reducing the territory of the serpent-worms. Dean’s clothes, which were damp so much of the time that they’d begun to rot off his body, finally dried out.  
  
He should have known better. Over time the weather went from warm to hot, and the once plentiful stands of drinkable water dried up along with everything else. The rats started migrating out of the woods, and toward the vast grasslands beyond. The wolves were close behind. The change in climate seemed to have affected their behavior. Before, they’d mostly come out at night.  Now they appeared at all times, and hunting rats put you in grave danger of running across a pack, even in broad daylight.  It never got truly dark anymore.  At “night” the sky dimmed to the color of a bruise. There were no clocks, but Dean had the feeling that nights were rarer and more precious than they had once been. The days seemed to last far longer than 24 hours.  
  
It was dusk, and Dean and Castiel were on the border of the woods, looking out over the rank grass of the open plains, considering whether it was worth the risk of venturing into the open to hunt, when they encountered the fireflies.  
  
Dean spotted them first, off in the distance. They swarmed together in elaborate patterns, like a school of fish swimming through the purple sky, blinking on and off in unison. Dean tapped Castiel’s arm and gestured at them. Castiel shook his head. He didn’t know what to make of them either. The swarm froze in mid-air, a solid band of light against the horizon. Then the band narrowed and headed straight for them.  
  
They looked at each other, unsure if they should be afraid, and then simultaneously decided to run. The swarm was on them in an instant. The glowing creatures didn’t have stingers, but they had sharp, tiny rows of teeth that dug into Dean’s flesh over and over again, leaving scores of little crescents all over his body. No matter how fast they ran the fireflies flew faster, and Dean felt certain he was about to be nibbled to death by a thousand mouths.  
  
A voice cried out to him–the first voice he’d heard that wasn’t Castiel’s in ages–and shouted something in a language he didn’t understand. He looked around, and saw a young girl covered from head to toe in mud.  
  
“Run!” he said, but the fireflies passed her by.  
  
“English?” the girl called after him. And then, “Roll in the mud! They will lose your scent.”  
  
Dean and Castiel both threw themselves into a mud pit that until recently must have been a pond. As they rolled around the biting dwindled, finally stopping entirely. The swarm hovered over them in a mass of blinking lights and then shot off, back in the direction of the plains.  
  
The girl stood at the lip of the mud hole and studied them skeptically. “This is not your home,” she concluded. “Come with me.”  
  
She started to walk away. She didn’t turn to check if they followed, but they did. It wasn’t as if they had anything better to do. She led them to a ridge near the border between the woods and the grassland. A stream ran past it, murmuring to itself. She gestured to an opening in the side of the ridge, partly obscured by vines. Dean hesitated. While the girl could walk in without bowing her head, it required him to go in on hands and knees, and he could see nothing of what waited for him on the other side. There could be a whole tribe of . . . anything, really . . . waiting to ambush him. He looked back at Castiel, who shrugged. They were in a bad situation no matter what they did. When the girl grabbed his wrist and tugged him forward he followed her into the cave.  
  
There was no one to attack him. The entryway to the cave, dimly lit by its sole opening, was empty. A couple of rats were strung up to dry, along with a collection of vegetation. The charred remains of a fire stood in one corner. The walls were covered with paintings in red ochre and charcoal. Dean saw the red-eyed wolves, the long, sleek rats, and the twisting serpent-worms, all represented. But he saw other things, too, things he couldn’t believe had ever existed in this place–fat bellied horses, and elk with impossible antlers; barrel-chested bulls and wooly mammoths with tremendous tusks. Over and over, the walls contained a single human figure like no figure he’d ever seen. It was the outline of a man with a woman emerging sideways out of it, four arms, four legs, and two heads, like some strange pair of conjoined twins.  
  
He turned back to the girl and found himself looking at a young Sammy, quizzical hazel eyes studying him from behind the mud mask. Dean reached for his bowie knife, but a hand behind him arrested the motion.  
  
“It’s a shifter,” Castiel said. “What did you expect? You’re the only human here.”  
  
Dean looked at little Sam. “Where are your parents?” he asked.  
  
The Child looked from Dean to Castiel. “Where are yours?” it answered. And Dean had to admit that was fair enough.  
  
+++++++  
  
The Child wouldn’t tell them its name, and it seemed reluctant to call either of them by their names either. Dean was “The Man” and Castiel was “The Angel.” Castiel theorized that it believed that names had a superstitious power, and was unwilling to speak them aloud. That made as much sense as anything else in this place. Names didn’t really matter when there were only three people in the world, anyway. “You,” “Me,” and “It” worked just fine. Dean tried to ask the Child how old it was. It said that it was ten. It thought that it had been ten for a long time.  
  
Life with the Child was easier than it had been before. The cave contained a still pool of clear water that seemed to be supplied by a subterranean spring. The Child showed them how to lay snares for the rats, which was far less dangerous than tackling them. It knew what roots and leaves were safe to safe to eat. It knew the hunting patterns of the wolves. It could tell them when the pack would be feeding, and it was best to stay inside. It taught them how to make blades from flint, and helped them build spears out of seasoned wood and stone.  
  
The Child did not change as the shifters did on earth, slowly and with great physical effort. It was the idea of a shifter, free of flesh. One moment it was one thing, and the next another. It might be a Chinese boy when it went gathered the rats from their traps, and an Indian girl, wrapped in a sari, by the time that it was skinning its catch. Above all, though, it was a mimic, and the longer it spent with them the more often its form echoed some part of their forms or memories. It resembled child-versions of Sam, or Dad, or Mom, or Lisa. No matter what form it took, Dean found Castiel in the Child’s body language--the tilt of the head, the piercing stare, the quizzical furrowed brow. If Dean was there, too, he was too blind to his own habits to see it.  
  
The Child was closer to Castiel than it was to Dean. This bothered Dean a little.  He’d always flattered himself that he was good with children. Castiel scarcely treated the Child like a child at all. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of “childhood.” He spoke to the Child like he would to an adult, and the Child responded in kind. Dean had to admit that it made a kind of sense.  There had always been something childlike hidden behind Castiel’s eyes. There was something ancient hidden behind the Child’s eyes. The two of them met in the middle. Castiel spoke to the Child in its own twittering, sing-song language, creating an intimacy that excluded the awkward, human third wheel. Most of the time, though, they were silent. Together they braided rope or hammered flint into knives for hours, and needed no words to understand each other perfectly.  
  
More and more, the Child’s knowledge faltered. The Child said that it had never seen weather like this before. In response to Castiel’s questioning it said that, no, there were no seasons in Purgatory, and it had no idea when or whether this unprecedented “summer” would pass.  
  
The strange changes in the climate had disrupted the patterns of the wolves, throwing the Child’s life into uncertainty and fear. Dean assumed that was the main reason that the Child tolerated their presence. The Child could escape predators more nimbly than Dean and Cas could ever hope to, but in a fight they were far stronger, and fights were harder to avoid these days.  
  
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
The Child was unsurpassed at laying traps, but Dean was the best at spear hunting. He prided himself on his ability to catch rats, and the peculiar tentacled creatures that lurked in the drying ponds.  
  
As the heat grew more intense, Dean found his clothes less necessary. He often went out hunting bare chested. As the white sky burned brighter, he began to return to their cave with sunburns across his shoulders and face that made Castiel furrow his brow with worry. Castiel suggested that perhaps Dean should no longer go out during the long, searing days, but Dean ignored him.  
  
This continued until the day that Dean came home sore and tired after a particularly successful hunt. He threw down three squid-like creatures, and a couple of giant rats, and crawled off to a corner of their cave to sleep.  
  
Dean woke up a couple of hours later, his skin raw and throbbing. Even in the dim, lurid light generated by the fire, Dean could see that he’d turned purple. He was swollen all across his face and upper body. His back hurt so much, even against the cool stone of the cave, that he couldn’t bear to lie down any longer. He drew himself up into a shivering ball.  
  
Castiel glanced at him and crawled over, concerned. He tried to touch Dean’s shoulder, and Dean flinched away in agony. The gentle press of Castiel’s fingers stung as sharply as the bite of the fireflies.  
  
“It’s sunburn,” Castiel said. “You’ve got second degree burns all over your upper body.”  
  
“Can’t be sunburn. There’s no sun,” Dean protested weakly. He didn’t know if he was hot or cold, he just knew that he couldn’t stop shaking. Castiel sighed.  
  
In the cool darkness of the cave, Dean spent the next three days burning his way through a raging fever. His skin swelled up and blistered. The only time the pain abated was when Castiel gathered cold water from the spring and poured it over Dean’s back. Castiel did this again and again, hour after hour, murmuring soothing words in Enochian. He pulled Dean’s hand away from his shoulders every time the itching compelled Dean to start to scratch the blisters. “You’ll get an infection,” Castiel said.  
  
The Child went out at some point, and returned with a bundle of herbs. It chewed the leaves, and then pressed the gooey mess to the worst of Dean’s blisters. The swelling abated, and the skin began to heal.  
  
Dean slept finally, while Castiel hovered over him uneasily. He awoke to find the Child gazing back at him from behind Ben’s face. “You are better,” the Child said confidently. It gestured to a new drawing on the cave wall. It showed the long, lean outline of three figures. One was a man unadorned. One wore a triangular cape that Dean recognized immediately as Castiel’s trench coat. The third, smaller figure was the man/woman conjoined twin that appeared throughout the cave. It stood between the other two, holding the hand of each. It was a surreal version of the family portrait that could be found on any refrigerator, anywhere in modern America. Dean was touched in spite of himself.  
  
“Yes,” he said. “I’m better now.”  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
After that, Castiel wouldn’t let Dean go out for long periods during the day. Dean resented the feeling of uselessness, but he knew that Cas had a point. The simmering white sky never seemed to have any impact on the angel at all. The Child did suffer as the days grew hotter, coming back to the cave raw and peeling, but it was able to shift its skin to darker tones, and it suffered less for it. Dean could only go out in the brief, twilight periods that passed for night. The rest of the time, he was bound to the cave, sharpening stone knives and whittling spears.  
  
The game had disappeared. The rats were either dead or had migrated to cooler, wetter climes. The spiders seldom came out at all. The wolves were ravenous, and patrolled the woods and plains alike, both day and night. Dean and the Child lived on whatever insects they could find, and on the herbs the Child had taught the three of them to gather, although these too were rapidly withering in the changing climate.  
  
Dean grew thinner, his ribs becoming prominent through his pale skin. The Child was hungry as well, although its deprivation did not show in its physical form, which had never been more than an illusion. It would come back to the cave with its clothes clawed to shreds and its flesh still knitting back together, and explain casually that a hunt had gone badly and it had been “reborn.” Each time it would draw a new image of itself–the conjoined twin symbol–accompanied by a butterfly. “To mark my transformation,” it said. There were a lot of butterflies.  
  
Castiel and the Child spoke more and more in the Child’s language, and Dean had the feeling that they were talking about him. Castiel was  immortal. Unless he was stabbed by an angel blade he couldn't die. The Child was already dead, so every death resulted in a rebirth, just as it had for Dean in Hell. But Dean was alive, and he knew that they both feared what would happen to him if he died here by violence or starvation. Would he resurrect? Would he disappear? Would he still be able to return to Earth if the possibility of escape presented itself?  
  
One day the Child vanished without explanation. It was gone for so long that Dean began to fear that it would not return. It came back, though, after all. In the violet light of dusk it dangled its feet in a dwindling pond. It gazed up at Dean and Cas, a dark haired boy with pale skin and startling blue eyes, and reported what it had learned.  
  
“I walk among the souls of those you call monsters,” it said, “in the shape of their friends. They see me, and they know me not. They say that the crystal spires of Heaven are smoldering with the fires of Chaos. They say that the frozen boneyards of Hell are troubled by civil war. They say that the vast cities of Earth threaten to sink into confusion. They say that the savage wilderness of Purgatory is destined to grow hotter. They say that we will all burn, and be reborn to burn again.”  
  
Castiel turned to Dean. “This is my fault,” he said. “When I opened the door to this world, I must have changed it irrevocably.”  
  
“These men speak, but they know nothing,” the Child said to Castiel. “Who can say what will happen?”  
  
After that, Dean noticed that drawings of rats began to proliferate around the cave. A handful were added at first, and then whole herds began to congregate on the walls, bigger and bigger with each passing day.  
  
The Child was drawing another sleek, fat rat in red ochre when Castiel approached and stood behind it. “That will not bring them back,” he said. The Child turned around, and gazed up as a boy with a freckled face and big green eyes. Castiel swallowed hard and looked away.  
  
“What I know, I know,” the Child said. But the rats did not return.  
  
Over time, the spring in the cave dried up and disappeared. Dean put on a brave face, but he was afraid. He and Castiel ventured out constantly, seeking water from the few remaining sources.  
  
The Child began to accumulate the bones of rats and wolves, and other creatures that Dean didn’t want to identify, and piled them up in front of the entryway to the cave. It gathered herbs, too, not the kind that it had taught Dean to eat, but others that he’d never seen before. When dusk came, it danced in a circle, wailing and rocking rhythmically. It slashed its forearm with a flint blade, and let the blood drip down on the pile. Then it bound its arm and set fire to herbs. It sat and gazed into the flames as if they contained some secret message. It stayed, fixed, long after the fire had burned down to ash.  
  
A few hours later, it rained. The Child splashed joyfully through the puddles, as if it were a real child, dressed in the shape of a little blonde girl who looked a bit like Dean’s mother. Dean was never sure if the rain was a coincidence or not. Either way, it didn’t matter. It kept getting hotter.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
The three of them huddled in the cave together while the blistering sun blazed above. Water was precious as gold. Dean hadn’t eaten anything bigger than a cockroach in days, and the Child was no better off. Castiel didn’t need food, but he seemed to feel their suffering like a physical weight that bowed his shoulders.  
  
“My people say that beyond the World Ocean lie the Isles of the Righteous, where game is plentiful and the souls of the blessed dead dwell in peace,” the Child said. “When first I come here, I follow the river to the Ocean, and I build a raft. Many times I set sail, and always I drown. I am reborn on the shore. It may be that there are no Isles of the Righteous. It may be that I am not worthy to join them. It may be that I am bad at building rafts. I know not. But we could try.”  
  
Dean was all for it. If they were going to die, he’d rather do it trying to improve their situation than cowering in a cave. Castiel was less enthusiastic. Castiel couldn’t drown, and if the Child drowned it would be reborn, as it had been before. If Dean drowned, though, none of them knew what would become of him.  
  
In the end, Castiel agreed. He had to accept that there was no longer anything he could do to keep Dean safe. They followed the creek bed that was all that remained of the stream that had once passed near the cave. Dean reluctantly hid under a wolf skin, sweating out what remained of his water, lips cracked and bleeding, feverish and miserable. Come the twilight that passed for night, the tops of his fingers were burned bright red where he’d held the hide over his head. They throbbed like they’d been skinned. He shucked off the wolf skin and lay sweating on top of it, unable to rest. Castiel carded his fingers through Dean’s hair, without even the pretense of sleep to excuse it, and Dean let him. Eventually he was soothed enough that he dozed fitfully. The child lay a dozen feet away, sleeping untroubled on the dead grass.  
  
They trudged on for five days. Or at least for five periods of sleep. “Days” had become a questionable measure of time. Dean and the Child survived on the dew they sucked off the grass, the mud puddles they found, and any insect left crawling through the wastes.  
  
On the fifth day, Castiel and the Child began to exchange meaningful glances. At first Dean paid no attention. His knees were jelly, and every step he took was an act of pure will. He had no energy left to contemplate their peculiar nonhuman communion. And then he saw it, too: they’d returned to the woods by their cave. Five days of walking, and they’d come full circle.  
  
“We must have gotten turned around,” Dean said. There was no other explanation.  
  
“We were following the river,” the Child said. “The river only runs one way.”  
  
Castiel looked at both of them wearily. “The river only runs one way,” he agreed. “The Ocean is gone.”  
  
“Gone?” Dean demanded. “If an entire fucking ocean dried up, wouldn’t we have noticed what was left behind?”  
  
“Not dried up,” Castiel said. “Gone. Purgatory is shrinking. We returned to the place where we started because we walked all the way around the world. What’s left of the world.”  
  
Dean wanted to scream, but he didn’t have the energy. He used all the strength that he had left to crawl back inside their cave and curl up against the wall. The Child curled up next to him, looking like little Sam, and held his hand. Castiel sat down on the other side, and held his hand too. Dean was too far gone to care whether it was weird. He knew that he was dying.  
  
When Dean saw the light radiating from the mouth of the cave, he thought at first that it was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The voice that came out of it, though, didn’t sound a thing like God.  
  
“Dean! Dean, can you hear me? Cas, are you there?”  
  
“Sam!” Dean shouted. Castiel smiled for the first time in ages. Dean tried to run toward the light, but he fell forward onto his hands and knees, too weak to stand. Cas grabbed Dean under the arms and supported him. They both stepped forward.  
  
“We’re here, Sammy,” Dean said. “And man, you didn’t show up a minute too soon.”  
  
“It’s good to hear your voice,” Sam said from the other side of the light. “Sorry about the delay. I pretty much had to tear a big doughnut hole in the middle Purgatory to get you guys out. Took about three months up here, but I’m guessing it was longer on your end.”  
  
“Little bit,” said Dean with a grin.  
  
A voice came from behind them. “It wasn’t your fault after all, Angel.”  
  
Dean turned around. The child was lithe and dark, dressed in animal skins and necklaces of shells. Its face was painted with ochre and its teeth were filed to points. Dean couldn’t have said if it was a boy or a girl. It reminded him of no one.  
  
Dean looked at Castiel. “We can take the kid with us, right?” Castiel and the Child both stared at him with their inscrutable young-old eyes, like he was the innocent.  
  
Dean turned back toward the light. “Sam, when we get out of here and you close up the doughnut hole, Purgatory will go back to normal, won’t it?”  
  
“Um,” Sam said. It was obvious that it hadn’t occurred to him to worry about it. “No idea, Dean. Does it matter?”  
  
The Child said something sharp in its native tongue, and slapped its palm against the painting of the three of them holding hands.  
  
Castiel responded calmly, gesturing to Dean. The Child fell silent. It tilted its head, an achingly familiar gesture, and appeared to consider what Castiel had said. Its shoulders slumped, and it nodded its head. It gave its answer in a single word.  
  
Dean was about to ask what had happened, but he never got the chance. Castiel had already gripped him tight, and they were both falling toward the light.

 

 


End file.
